“In many ways, it’s a simple game,” she continued. “Your goal is to gain enough points on your scale to tip it until it touches the table. But in every other way, it’s infernally difficult. Every card has multiple meanings, and each can be played differently depending on the situation. Don’t worry, though. I’ll keep it straightforward for you and stick to the simple meanings.”

  I picked up the deck she had laid out for me, curiosity pulling me in every direction. One by one, I flipped through the cards, letting them slide onto the table face-up.

  Each card was a work of art. A robed sorcerer stood atop a jagged cliff, clutching a pulsating power stone, his face alight with an otherworldly glow. Another card depicted a rain of stones falling upward, defying gravity in a tempest that ripped chunks from the earth. On yet another, a streak of fiery red split the sky. It was a comet beginning its slow, inevitable descent toward the destruction of the planet.

  They were masterpieces, each and every one. All were breathtaking in its detail and alive with the stories they contained. I hurriedly set the deck back down, my hands trembling slightly. This deck was leagues beyond the one I’d seen back in my village. That one had been a toy in comparison.

  I looked up at Nana Glob, stunned. She merely grinned wider as though she knew exactly how I felt.

  “How can your decks be this expensive?” I asked, still trying to wrap my head around it.

  “Expensive?” She chuckled, as though I had told a particularly funny joke. “These? These are mere trinkets.” Her tone was light, but her gaze suddenly sharpened as she added, “Now, I do recommend you shuffle gently. Very gently. Otherwise, I might have to start using your name instead of Carl’s as the greatest idiot I’ve ever had the pleasure of interacting with.”

  I winced slightly at the jab, but before I could respond, she continued. “Now, which deck will you be playing?”

  I glanced at the two decks in front of me. Without much thought, I placed the deck I hadn’t looked through in front of me. I liked games. I loved them, actually. They were strategic, challenging, and from what I’d heard, popular in the capital. Most of all, I enjoyed the thrill of competition, of going head-to-head against someone and coming out on top.

  Still, I hesitated. If I was going to play against Nana Glob, I needed every advantage I could get. My hand hovered over the deck I had initially inspected, ready to snatch it back up, but I stopped myself at the last second.

  “Which one is simpler?” I asked, looking back up at her. I had a feeling that trying to out-strategize her with a complicated deck would only trip me up.

  Her eyebrows rose, and for the first time, a full smile cracked her face. “Perhaps you do have more potential than Carl after all,” she said with a hint of mockery. “That’s almost a good idea you’ve had there.”

  She tapped the deck I had chosen. “Both decks are relatively simple, but this one will serve you just fine. You can’t go wrong with it.”

  There was an unmistakable glint in her eye now. I wondered if she’d been waiting for this moment all along.

  We shuffled our decks as she explained the rules, her voice smooth and practiced. Each turn, a card would be drawn and another played. Early in the game, the cards were weaker, but as time passed, their power steadily grew. Additional strategies allowed for multiple cards to be played at reduced strength or even forgoing an action to draw more. The more she spoke, the more bewildered I became by the sheer number of options. She described a few of the cards’ effects, but when I pressed her with questions, she dismissed them with a cryptic promise: the cards essentially did whatever their pictures suggested, and she’d explain the details fairly when I played them. That promise left me taken aback.

  The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

  “How is it fair I only learn what a card does when I play it?” I asked.

  She fixed me with the kind of patronizing look Ole Greybeard reserved for the young and foolish whenever he got deep in his cups with Albert. “Life isn’t fair,” she said simply.

  I couldn’t argue with that.

  When we finished shuffling, I placed my deck into the board’s small indent, ready to draw my opening hand, but Nana Glob stopped me, her face crystallizing into something unreadable.

  “Why don’t we place a bet on this game? A simple one. If you lose, you grant me a wish. If I lose, I’ll grant you one,” she said, her voice light and gentle.

  “What’s the catch?”

  “No catch,” she said with an innocent shrug. “If you don’t like the terms, you can always refuse.”

  I hesitated, weighing her words carefully. There was something about Nana Glob that made me wary. Something I couldn’t quite put my finger on unsettled me. If I won, I could ask for sword training, and I had no doubt she’d deliver. But what good would that do if they left in just a few days? I could ask to join them as well, but I hadn’t yet gotten confirmation they were going to the Capitol. Besides, I didn’t trust my odds. I barely understood the rules, let alone my own deck. Hubris could only stretch so far.

  “No dice,” I said finally. “This whole thing is stacked against me.”

  She merely shrugged, her arm whisking back to her side of the wooden tray as she drew her first card.

  While the chances of winning were slim, I still relished the opportunity to wipe Nana Glob’s smirk off her face. Unfortunately, the game didn’t start in my favor. Nana Glob opened with a pair of Twin Guardians. One card a towering figure of carved stone draped in twisting vines that seemed to writhe and grow even now, the other a hulking mound of dirt wielding a colossal warhammer.

  I clenched my teeth to stop myself from pointing out that she had played two cards simultaneously. Her phantom voice echoed in my ears, what idiot would think you played twins separately? Tearing my focus from her gleeful expression, I turned to my own hand, spreading the cards in a careful fan.

  The illustrations were mesmerizing and overwhelming. A spear of air, sharp and lethal, hummed with danger. A radiant sun peeked over the horizon heralding renewal or perhaps inevitably. Another card depicted a murky swamp, its bubbling surface promising a creature lurking just beneath the muck. My fingers hovered over a shadowy portal as well, its swirling depths containing untold mysteries. Further down, there was a brazier of blue flames, a streaking meteor like the one I’d seen earlier, and a cryptic stone tablet inscribed with runes I couldn’t decipher.

  My eyes hesitated over the swamp, reasoning it might slow her giants down, but discarded the thought. Both her summons looked more than capable of trudging through any mire. They practically looked like they were born in a swamp! Eventually, I chose the shadowy portal, indecision still tearing at my soul. While I wasn’t confident in my decision, its potential to stop her two giants seemed greater than the rest of my cards.

  As I laid the card on the table, Nana Glob raised an eyebrow. “The Shadow Rift,” she mused, her tone betraying a hint of surprise. “A bold choice. If you can keep it alive, it could swing the game. Each turn, it’ll summon a spawn, and those spawns grow stronger the longer the Rift remains open. Now, the key part is keeping it alive.”

  Her words filled me with a mixture of hope and dread. I glanced at her guardians again and swallowed hard. This wasn’t going to be easy.

  She drew her card with a practiced flick of her wrist and then placed another card in her hand on the table, revealing an army of tiny, well-dressed mice. I squinted at the illustration, trying to take it all in. The mice wore a wild assortment of clothing: top hats, scarves, cloaks, and tunics in every imaginable style. But their adorable appearance was undercut by the weapons they carried: tiny maces, bows, spears, hammers, and other implements of war I couldn’t even identify.

  Nana Glob’s eyes glinted with mischief as she moved her intimidating guardians across the table. Without hesitation, she slid my shadow rift into a small indent at the corner of the table, far from the battlefield.

  “Tough luck,” she said, her tone half gleeful and half instructive. “Looks like I destroyed your Shadow Rift. I, personally, would have played a defensive unit first. You’ll learn.”

  “Really?” I shot back, my frustration bubbling to the surface. “You couldn’t have mentioned that when I played it? I would’ve done something else.”

  She scoffed, utterly unapologetic. “What would have been the fun in that?”

  I realized with growing irritation that she was enjoying herself immensely. This wasn’t just a game to her. It was a lesson, and I was the student fumbling through it.